LDV113-4

29 MICHEL BOUVARD My dream would have been to hear Franck in real life, since it would appear he played with tremendous freedom. In his case, to say he ‘played like a pianist’ (and what a pianist!) seems to me to be more of a compliment! In fact, the very thing that fascinates me about the organ – and I’ve tried to pass this on to others during my forty years of teaching – is how to turn this instrument, which seems so mechanical, into a genuinely ‘musical’ one. ‘Music is a relationship’, said the organist and composer Michael Radulescu. Just as, looking down from the organ loft of Saint-Sernin on that immense nave, one is overwhelmed by the multitude of Romanesque arches, small or large, linked together in a prodigious coherence, I’d say that the music of Franck is extremely rich in the varied and sometimes underlying relationships that go to make it up, among the different themes, harmonies, organic relationships between phrases, even ‘macro-relationships’ between different parts of a single work. He works by means of juxtapositions and superimpositions.